


Harmonies

by skitzofreak



Series: the stars are singing [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Growing Together through the war, Missing Scenes, Non-Chronological, Scenes from Alternate POV, Supplemental to the first story, but backwards this time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 22:19:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15422823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: (Maybe, someday, when they are free of this - )--The chapters of "A Love Song," seen through Cassian's eyes.





	1. the syntax of things

**Author's Note:**

> A warning: while these _might_ be alright as standalone once the whole story is posted, it really is meant to be supplemental to the first in this series, ["A Love Song"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12351450/chapters/31669830). Also, the story here is written backwards, which might add an additional element of confusion if you're not familiar with the other story in this series. If you'd rather not read that, however, then all you really need to know is that in _this_ universe, Jyn and Cassian have met several times throughout their otherwise completely canon lives. Which means that in _this_ universe, they aren't (quite) as desperately alone. 
> 
> This first chapter takes place during Chapter 10 of A Love Song, while Jyn is dealing with a shower, food, and the sudden terrifying relief of not being watched constantly. The [original version](https://skitzofreak.tumblr.com/post/171760108489/part-of-a-quote-if-you-will-i-am-half-agony) of this chapter is on tumblr.

“My scenario predictions indicated a ninety-six percent chance that you would be pleased to find Jyn alive,” Kay’s servos whir with concern as he follows Cassian into the droid bay. “But then, I did not account for discovering a potential Imperial connection.” He sounds grumpy about the oversight, and in the back of his mind, Cassian anticipates a long series of software upgrades that Kay will demand over the next few days.

But the thought comes like an echo out of the fog, distant and unimportant, and unlikely to guide him out of the haze. “What connection?” he asks anyway, because people too often ignore Kay when he speaks _._   _Jyn’s alive,_ he thinks, and his hands itch with the memory of her fingers curled around his, months ago in the dark of her little safehouse.  _Alive, alive, alive._

Alive, but if the time between then and now have worn him down to shadows and fading hope, it has cut her into sharp edges and hunted eyes. Jyn is alive, on Yavin IV, and he had been only a few steps from her in that holding cell - but the chasm of six painful months had yawned between them and all Cassian could do was stand there while his heart twisted with want and regret and fear. He had watched for some kind of sign, and there had been a moment, but...he waited and he watched and he's usually a master at that sort of thing, but today it had failed him. He still doesn't know if she saw him, if it's  _his_  Jyn in that cell or just the burned out shell of a woman who looks like her.

“The connection to her father, the Imperial weapons researcher,” Kay stomps past him as they round the corner and heads straight for the charging port, clearly not noticing the way his unemotional statement lashes out and smacks Cassian right in the face.

“Wait,” he demands just as Kay steps onto the charging platform and the little plug automatically pops out to connect to his chassis. “What about him?”

“The most logical reason for your distress regarding our friend - " Kay pauses, and then continues, “Correction:  _Jyn Erso_ , is due to her connections to a known enemy.”

Cassian opens his mouth to argue, because his “distress” most certainly does not have anything to do with Galen Erso. If Jyn had been working with her father at all, Cassian would long ago have been killed or captured or…but he stalls out before he can correct Kay, and the droid clicks into low-power mode, his optics going dark.

“I am happy to see her,” Cassian says anyway, but his voice sounds strained and uncertain even to his own ears. He grimaces and swallows hard, because he's giving away too much, being far too obvious for safety's sake.

“I’m glad she made it out of there,” he tries again, because no one else is around and maybe if he hears it aloud, maybe if he just says it, he can get it under control.  _Own your emotions,_  his first trainer had told him, years ago when he was nine years old and just beginning to understand what fate and the war had led him to do.  _If you can’t even admit what you feel, you can’t control it._ He waits a moment longer, cataloging his reactions to the words hanging in the air; heart beating too fast, hands cold, a twisting in his gut that might be fear, might be guilt, might be something wholly different (something bright, something sparking, something he thought snuffed out when he watched the newsvid of her falling). 

“I am so,” he whispers roughly, his hands clenched tight into fists at his side, “so fucking glad she’s alive.”

He stands still, and lets the (terrifying, beautiful, hopeful) truth fade in the soft, familiar quiet of the droid bay around him.

Kay doesn’t move, his exterior sensors shut down to conserve power and facilitate a faster recharge, but Cassian can hear his question anyway:  _then why are you so distressed?_

_Because I left her behind, just like Saw Gerrera, just like her parents, just like everyone else who ever failed her. Because she looked at me in her prison cell and I’m not sure whether she saw me, or just another warden bullying her. Because she knows more about me than anyone alive, and I still want her to know more. Because she might not want to know more. Because I promised her everything - even if I never said it aloud - and then I left her with nothing._

_Because I had her and I lost her, and I’m not sure I can take that again._

“She’s alive,” he says out loud, just to cut off the downward spiral of his thoughts. “That’s all - that’s all that matters right now.” He feels the truth of that settle around him, burning back a little of the fog and giving him a moment to think clearly. Yes, that will be enough for now. Whether she hates him, or has discarded him, or…or anything else, that can wait. He has to find her father, has to find answers, has to stop whatever evil is growing in the Empire’s violent heart. He has to answer the question in her eyes when her father’s name is spoken.

Everything else, he thinks with grim determination as he turns to his workbench - fear, grief, longing, guilt - all of that can wait. Jyn’s alive, and for all her stubborn insistence that she didn’t get involved in rebel affairs, she’s done too much to help him against the Empire over the years for him to believe that she doesn’t really care. And however silent she’s been about her family and her past, he knows her face enough to recognize the shadows in her eyes that mask something much more fragile. Right now Jyn has more than enough on her plate without his issues. He has more than enough on his own.

(Maybe, someday, when they are free of this - )

He can wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _since feeling is first_   
>  _who pays any attention_   
>  _to the syntax of things_
> 
>  
> 
> \- e e cummings


	2. never wholly kiss you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place during chapter 9 of "A Love Song." Also, yes, I am messing with canon a bit re: Cassian's role in tracking down a connection to Galen Erso. This is a slightly different world, after all.

Cassian returns from Kafrene with a spray of blood on his boots and a whispering terror in his heart. Tivik – hunched, nervous, homesick Tivik, who had the audacity to want to save his homeworld – Tivik dies quiet and clean and quick, because that is the only mercy Cassian can afford to give. The only mercy the galaxy can afford him to give. The shot burns clean through the Jedhan’s heart (Cassian always aims for the heart in up-close kills; it’s a less messy death than headshots, which tend to splatter), but Tivik falls hard to the rough pavement, and his head splatters anyway, just enough to get a fine line of droplets on Cassian’s boot. He doesn’t notice until he’s halfway back to Yavin, and the blood has long dried.

Draven meets him as he disembarks from the small courier-class ship he had checked out for this mission. The hangar chief is all too happy to get the courier back, and she chatters cheerfully as he signs the documentation and dumps all flight data into the nearby flight log console. Cassian listens to her rapid-fire calculations of refuel times, jump logs, and Yavin’s grav-field effect on launches with only half an ear, a part of his mind following along her simplistic formulas and mostly agreeing with them. Most of him, however, focuses on the ominous presence of his commanding officer. It’s unusual but not alarming for Draven to meet him in the hangar, especially not when Cassian sent ahead a heavily encrypted message packet outlining his findings from Kafrene. But the dark look on Draven’s face  _is_  alarming, despite the professionally neutral way he holds his body (shoulders down and back, jaw relaxed, chin level with the floor, spine straight and stiff as an icicle).

Cassian can feel the ice in his own spine, although these days it feels less bracing and more brittle, ever since he walked back into his cargo hold and realized that she wasn’t –

Cassian abruptly jams the toes of his right foot against the leather sole of his bloody boot until it hurts, until the stinging pain in his foot is strong enough to focus the whole of his attention on. It’s one of the best ways to distract himself from showing any facial expression when he’s hit with unexpected emotion, because hardly anyone ever looks down at his feet and his boots mask the small movement anyway. Cassian grinds his toe against the leather while keeping his jaw relaxed, his eyes calm, and neither the hangar chief, the astromech, nor Draven give any indication that they’ve noticed. None of them look down at the blood on his boots.

When it’s safe, when he trusts himself not to wander back into dark memories, he eases the pressure and resolutely goes back to authorizing the console to download his hyperspace logs.

It takes a few more minutes to upload the older ship’s log, but eventually the console chimes and the hangar chief steps close. “Thanks, Captain, just drop the crypto key on the table here, and that’s all we’ll need from you, have a great day, ‘scuse me, ‘scuse me.” She moves to bump Cassian away from the console log with a friendly elbow and flashes him a distracted grin as she starts typing furiously on the interface and speaking into her comm for her crew captains. Cassian shuffles out of the way before her gentle nudge can actually connect, nodding politely to reduce any appearance of discomfort. He allows himself to use the distraction to avoid meeting Draven’s eye for just a few more seconds - a few tiny, precious moments when all he has to think about is dropping the courier ship’s specialized crypto key into the little bucket next to the hangar chief’s astromech, a few moments of semi-quiet in his head, because a few moments is all he gets anymore, all he can manage before the war and the blood and  _oh my, that was a rather graphic shot, wasn’t it_  come crushing back down on his bones.

He drops the key in the bucket, nods to the astromech when it whistles  _if (good day) = 1, then {enjoy!},_ and finally turns to his commander.

Draven doesn’t speak, he simply turns on his heel and starts walking. Cassian stretches his legs to catch up. He’s not a short man, but Draven towers over most of the Humans around here, and he considers slowing down to either be a waste of time or an insult. They pace through the hangar, sidestepping moving fighter craft and bustling droids. Finally, Draven seems to judge that the noise level of the hangar is sufficiently high to cover their conversation, and he clears his throat and says in a low voice, “Planet killer.”

Two days ago, when he first heard that phrase in a dark alley on Kafrene, Cassian’s stomach had frozen over with terror. The whole way back to Yavin, the words had stabbed into his guts, planet killer,  _planet_ killer. He had paced through the tiny courier ship, five steps in one direction, turn, five steps again, turn, trying to jigsaw what little information he had on the Imperial weapon program around those two core words (trying not to look down at his boots). How did it kill  _planets?_ Was it a bio weapon? Some kind of disease they planned to release? Or was it more like Geonosis, a concentrated chemical bombardment that left the planet toxic to all carbon-based life? A coordinated series of radioactive bombs?

Tivik hadn’t known. Possibly the pilot he mentioned hadn’t known either.

Galen Erso knew. Galen Erso had sent the pilot. Allegedly.

“The weapon is real,” Cassian tells his superior, keeping his voice under the riot of hangar noise. “But the name might be a trap.”

Draven nods. “We found a lead on that.”

The ice in Cassian’s stomach thickens. A lead on Erso – it’s too much to hope for that they’ve already found a location. He’s been looking for a dozen former Imperial scientists who ‘vanished’ over the last few decades, and so far he hasn’t come close to a single one of them. If he’s really lucky, though, Draven might have a possible contact who  _might_ know where to start looking. Cassian waits patiently.

“Gerrera,” Draven says gruffly, and Cassian’s faint hope shatters.  _Gerrera?_ The man that Draven calls ‘a loose blaster cannon,’ the man who inspires that steely, determined look in Mothma’s eye whenever he’s mentioned? Sure, Tivik said Gerrera has the pilot, but if he did, the poor bastard is probably dead by now. Gerrera is not gentle, nor kind, to Imperials in any form – even the noncombatants. Cassian isn’t a part of the Public Information Division of Intel (who are in reality the propaganda guys, and everyone knows it but no one says it aloud), but he knows that Saw Gerrera has been a thorn in the Alliance’s Heroes of the Galaxy image for years. As far as Cassian can tell, the disdain is mutual. Draven really thinks  _Gerrera_  will give them the lead on Erso?

“He’ll kill an Alliance agent before he speaks to one,” Cassian reminds Draven, which is perhaps toeing the line of respect for a commander but Cassian’s boots are already bloody and Draven wants him to talk to  _Saw Gerrera_.

“We have a potential go-between.” Draven’s tone is calm, but there’s a tightness to his mouth as he says it, a souring of his expression. Whoever this go-between is, Draven doesn’t like it. Cassian’s stomach freezes a little bit more, the cold spreading through his ribcage and making his skin pebble and shiver. He’s worked for the general long enough to know that Draven’s usual objections shake out along the lines of the subject’s usefulness, not necessarily on the ethics of using them. So if this ‘go-between’ is a killer or a bounty hunter or a sentient trafficker, well, working with them might just be what needs to be done. But if they are a liar, a traitor, a thief or a merchant (in Draven’s head, often the same thing), then the general might dig his heels in and make this op a whole lot more difficult.

“I’m designating you lead on this operation,” Draven says after they have walked a little farther. “All the files from the other operatives who have been working this case will be made available to you. All the analysis from your undercover excursion with Gendreef will be shifted to your classified access index. I have to shift my other operatives to other leads and projects, but this is the best trail we’ve found for the weapon so far, so it’s yours. Gerrera is on Jedha. You have your droid, the go-between, and whatever ship you deem acceptable for mission parameters.”

Cassian nods. It’s not flattery, Draven giving him the best lead and trusting him to run it without additional support. Captain Andor has simply been one of Draven’s most successful, and longest lasting, operatives in the past fifteen years. The general isn’t implying that Cassian is more trustworthy or skilled than the rest. It’s just experience, and statistics. He is more likely to succeed with the smallest of resource pools.

If it’s even possible to succeed. If they aren’t long past the point of no return and all this is just the last desperate scrambling of dying men. Of dead men.

Cassian swallows, stops himself from shivering. “Is the go-between available?”

“Any minute now,” Draven nods towards the open hangar door. “Strike Team Charlie is bringing her in. Sent your droid along.” He clears his throat and keeps his attention straight ahead, but Cassian hears the underlying message. Kay has an unfortunate tendency to get restless in the droid bays, and he wanders around the base when it gets too difficult for him to remain in the confined space. With the Imperial crest still prominent on his shoulder, the looming profile of a security droid, and no visible restraining bolt pinned to his cranial or chassis…it’s caused more than one incident. Draven has taken to sending Kay on ‘small’ missions when Cassian is forced to leave him behind at base. It makes Cassian’s heart squeeze painfully tight every time, and he finds himself sweeping a covert glance around the hangar, looking for the reassuring bulk of black metal and glowing white optics. Nothing.

Melshi leads Strike Team Charlie. Melshi will bring Kay back. He won’t let his team dismantle or destroy the droid out in the field, either. He’s not a big fan of Kay’s, but he owes Cassian his life at least three times over. He’ll bring Kay back. If possible.

Cassian digs his toe into his boot heel again, briefly.

“I’ll speak to her tomorrow,” Cassian tells Draven. “After my reports are filed.”

“And you’ve cleaned up,” Draven says flatly. Cassian jumps and glances at the general from the corner of his eye. Draven’s face is straight ahead; he’s not looking at Cassian’s boots. He’s very pointedly not looking at Cassian’s boots. “Eat,” Draven adds with a slight edge to the word. He opens his mouth as if to say more, then snaps it shut.

“Yes, sir,” Cassian replies, and neither man looks down.

“I’ll arrange the interrogation for tomorrow.” Draven says after a short beat, and strides away.

Cassian steps to the side of the bustling thru-way, letting the hangar maintenance and droid crew flow around him. The ice in his stomach doesn’t melt, but some of the strict tension he’s been holding in his shoulders unwinds. He closes his eyes for a brief moment and takes a deep breath. He shouldn’t relax, not even a little, because he can feel the weight of the exhaustion hovering just over the back of his neck. If he drops his guard now, he will be crushed under it.

But just for a moment, a tiny, selfish moment, he lets himself remember what is was like to push all the world away, what it felt like to forget the Empire and the planet killer and the blood on his boots (on his hands, in his mouth, his eyes, his soul). For just one moment, he lets himself remember what it felt like when the world was soft and dark and safe and he thought he almost knew what a better world could really look like, feel like, someday. When he almost could see a future that wasn’t death and pain and blood on his boots, when he could just see the shape of happiness in the shadows,  _would you like me to show you a helpful diagram?_  and he had  _laughed_ –

But that isn’t his life. It never really had been, and it never would be again.

Cassian opens his eyes, grabs his datapad and snaps it open. He needs supplies for the trip. He should have asked if the go-between was Human or not. Statistically, they are probably carbon based and able to consume most Human food, so he can get the basic travel package from the quartermasters. Kay will need an oil bath, most likely, and Cassian should check through his emergency repair kit to make sure all the consumables have been replaced with non-expired materials.

He looks up, does a quick scan. No Kay. His back is starting to ache with the memories of all the people he’s lost.

He’ll need blaster ammo packs, too. There’s no way a trip to visit Gerrera won’t result in some kind of fire fight, no matter how good the go-between or how lucky Cassian gets (he’s used up all the luck he’s likely to ever get in this lifetime, anyway). The U-Wing will be sufficient for the two week trip; it’s becoming associated with the rebellion, but he can’t land in Jedha itself anyway, not since the invasion there. So he’ll take the risk of association and go with the faster, more maneuverable craft. He can take the atmospheric hyperspace limiter out of the U-Wing easier than any other craft anyway. He’s never really understood the point of those things.

“Oh good, you have returned,” a crisp electronic voice calls over the chaos of the hangar.

For the first time in days, a little of the ice in his guts thaws. He looks up from the datapad and steps forward, back into the flow of the thru-way. Kay cuts through the hangar traffic with the unconcerned air of a giant metal combat-grade droid, ignoring the indignant squeal of an insulted astromech that nearly careens into his leg and the irritated grunt of a Human crew chief who has to dodge around him at the last second. Kay appears entirely undamaged from his excursion with Strike Team Charlie. Another chip of ice flakes away in Cassian’s stomach. “I have a status report for you,” Kay announces as he comes close, and Cassian reaches out a hand and thumps it gently against Kay’s chassis. It’s a bit of an emotional show, perhaps, but…there is blood on his boots and memory in his spine, and Cassian decides not to care. No one is looking anyway.

Wait. That’s not quite true. Someone  _is_  looking at him, he can feel it in the prickle of his skin, the hair on the back of his neck. Cassian raises his head and does another quick sweep of the hangar, looking for anyone who might be moving out of synch with their assigned task or maybe watching him through an angled reflection on the equipment in –

Jyn is staring at him.

She’s fifty paces away, standing in the middle of the hangar like she just wandered out of his most desperate dreams, her hair lank around her thin, smudged face and her shoulders twisted oddly with tension. Cassian’s world freezes over, even his heart jolting to a painful stop.

Jyn takes a step toward him. She doesn’t scream or snarl or bleed from the mouth like she has in his nightmares; she doesn’t smile or laugh or reach out for him with light in her eyes like she does in his good (his worst) dreams. She simply steps forward, a jerky, uncertain movement, unbalanced by the stiffness in her shoulders and the slightly wild look in her eyes. Wild, halting, alive.

Jyn is  _alive_.

Abruptly, her arms are jerked to the side, she stumbles again, her head turning away from him to face the threat, and Cassian’s world unfreezes, in fact, it explodes with astonishment and rage as he registers that the awkwardness in her shoulders is a product of the chains around her wrists. That she stumbles because a man in a uniform has just yanked her binders sharply towards him, dragging her away with his stun baton pulled and ready to smash down on her thin bones. Cassian’s heart pounds so hard in his chest it feels like it might break his ribs, and his skin feels flushed, blood burning through him. She’s alive, in chains, and before her body blocks his line of sight, he spots the thin line of dried blood down her fingers.

“Jyn was in Wobani,” Kay’s voice feels like a douse of cold water over his head, and Cassian snaps back to reality just as he starts to shove forward, honed in on the guard, on Jyn. “It appears that she was not terminated, but captured and imprisoned. Strike Team Charlie was ordered to remove her from Wobani and bring her here. They failed, so I knocked her down and brought her back.”

Cassian blinks. She’s still there, glaring up at the guard (the  _Alliance base security guard_ , a friendly, not a stormtrooper, not an Imperial), and Kay’s words still don’t make sense. Why did Strike Team Charlie pick up Jyn? How has she been alive all this time and he didn’t –

Jyn.

Jyn, who fought with the Partisans, under Saw Gerrera, when she was a child. Jyn, Jyn is the go-between!

His mind feels feverish, churning through the information and the questions and the gaps he can’t fill. Why is Jyn the go-between? What does she have to do with Galen Erso, with the pilot, with any of it? Why would Draven pull a soldier who left Gerrera under bitter conditions years ago?

The security guard tugs on Jyn’s wrists again, the stun baton tight in his other hand, an ugly expression on his face.

Cassian has to talk to Draven. He has to talk to him right now.

He spins on his heels (his heart hammers harder, he’s leaving her behind again, oh Force and fuck and any god who might be listening, he didn’t just leave her to die, he left her to the  _Imperials_ ), and breaks into a run through the hangar.

Kay is right behind him, heavy feet clanking.  “This is not the reaction I anticipated.”

“Draven,” Cassian grits out, but doesn’t explain. He needs to speak to Draven. He needs to speak to  _Jyn_ , right now, not tomorrow.

“Does the general know that you have past experience with Jyn Erso?”

Cassian slams to a halt, struck by two simultaneous and overwhelming realizations at once.

The first: Draven does not know anything about Cassian’s connection to the Partisan child who became a galactic thief and smuggler. No one in the Alliance has any idea that he maintained any contact, let alone a personal connection, with someone wholly outside the intel network of contacts, spies, and informants. He never registered her as an asset. He never mentioned her tips or data drops in any report, even going out of his way to obscure the source. At the time, it had simply felt natural; operatives were given a lot of leeway as it was, and Cassian had earned enough trust to run his ops his way without too much scrutiny. And there was simply no need to risk exposing Jyn to possible Imperial informants or moles (no need to risk exposing himself to anyone). The problem is how it will now appear to Command. Cassian has a history with this woman. He has a personal attachment, which will be all more obvious if he comes running into Command looking like a panicked wreck. Draven will probably take him off lead, maybe off the operation altogether. Jyn will get packed off with the next operative in line, someone who won’t know her, won’t trust her, won’t take the fucking  _shackles_  off her bloody wrists -

The second: Jyn  _Erso_.

He staggers to the nearest wall, which thankfully has a door leading up to Command nearby. He doesn’t pass through it just yet; instead, he leans against the clammy stone and presses his forehead against the hard surface. Closes his eyes.

Jyn is alive. Here, on Yavin. Alive.

But his Jyn is Jyn Erso. She’s related to Galen Erso, to the Imperial traitor who might be building the Empire the worst weapon the galaxy has ever seen. It’s likely she’s even his daughter. Jyn  _Erso._

Does it matter?

( _She lunges forward, grabs his hand, and her voice is hoarse but defiant, unrelenting - Not without you_. _He makes a half-hearted attempt to pull away, to force her to save herself from the mess he’s made of this operation, but she clings tight and moves in close, her breath on his cheek and her eyes wide, fierce. Not without you.)_

No, it doesn’t matter.

Cassian opens his eyes, straightens.

“Kay,” he says quietly. “Remember how I had you mark Jyn’s name as classified?”

“Nine point three years ago, when I first met her,” Kay replies promptly, whirring softly. “Is the designation still valid?”

“Yes,” Cassian takes a deep breath. “Everything you know about Jyn that wasn’t in Strike Team Charlie’s mission brief is now classified.”

Kay whirs again, briefly, and then hunkers his body down slightly, the way he does when he is attempting to appear comforting to smaller beings. It rarely works, because Kay is two meters of bulky metal and sharp edges, but Cassian appreciates the effort. “Level?”

Cassian clenches his jaw. “Category five,” he says at last – Our Eyes Only. There are very, very few things he keeps information from the Alliance; after all, Cassian was a child when he came here, and the Empire had already taken all his small secrets. If Draven ever found out about this security measure he has with Kay, this set of files that Kay encrypts and hides in the deep recesses of his memory drives that only Cassian is ever allowed to access, if Mothma knew about the secrets Cassian locks away in his soul and never intends to give to anyone, not even his allies…hells, if  _Organa_  knew –

“Complete,” Kay says. “Are all encounters with Jyn Erso also classified Category five?”

“Everything but the Wobani mission,” Cassian decides, because there is no doing this by half measures, not if he wants them all to survive, not if he wants Jyn to –

Not if he wants Jyn.

“Understood,” Kay rises to his normal slouch. “Are we still going to talk to Draven?”

“Yes,” Cassian runs a hand through his hair, scrubs at his face, glances at his bloody boots. “But I need to clean up first, and put on my uniform. Put in a request with the quartermaster for standard trip rations and get an oil bath. I’ll comm you when…when we’re ready to go.”

“Jyn may not be aware,” Kay says, not moving, “of the Category five.”

He nods. “I know. But she knows how to be careful. I’ll…I’ll get through to her.”

If she wants him to. If she’s willing to listen. He left her in an Imperial prison.

Cassian shakes his head. “I’ll get through to her,” he repeats, because it’s the only hope he has.

“Understood,” Kay says again, and walks away toward the quartermaster’s distribution center.

Cassian rubs his cold, clammy hands on his trousers, takes a deep breath that does little to slow the throbbing of his heart, and goes to clean the blood off his boots.

 


	3. a better fate

Cassian has stolen a lot of things in his time with the Alliance (and before it, but he doesn’t think about that, he can’t afford to think about that). He’s lied, cheated, charmed, intimidated, and outright snatched everything from food to information to weapons to people. Whatever the rebellion needed, whatever his contacts and informants demanded, whatever it took to drive the Empire back.

This, though. This might be the greatest, most incredible, most breathtakingly unbelievable thing he’s ever dared to stretch out his hands and take.

Cassian has stolen a life.

That’s how he keeps thinking of it, although the phrasing is…well, not great. He’s aware that it sounds like he’s killed someone. Which he has, more than one, and that’s just in the last day cycle. But this time that's not what he means, and weirdly, he has to keep reminding himself of that.

He’s stolen a life that has never been his, and he can’t quite explain how he managed it. He can’t really even believe it’s happening.

“What the fuck is that?” Jyn demands, her eyes narrowing suspiciously as she squints at the holoscreen hovering at the other end of the bed by their feet. She’s sitting with her knees curled up almost to her chest, her bare toes curling in the wrinkled coverlet and her arms wrapped securely around her middle. It doesn’t seem to phase her that she is doing so while wearing a faded, oversized green sweatshirt that falls to her upper thighs, and nothing else. She's curled forward, her weight resting on her knees rather than the meager pillows piled up behind them, and for the first time since he met her on this planet, she looks her actual age, young and soft in the dim lighting of the room. Cassian keeps alternating between appreciating the view, jerking his head away when he catches himself looking, and then reminding himself that she grinned at him when she sat down for the first time, and clearly noted his attention. He has to keep reminding himself that she likes him looking at her. Or acts like she does, anyway.

He lines up a shot on that last thought and puts a bolt cleanly between the eyes. He’s not going to let that kind of thinking circle over his head. He’s not going to pick apart her every possible motivation, looking for the trap. Oh, he’ll do that eventually, he can’t afford not to, can't afford to put the Alliance at that kind of risk. But they have roughly seventeen hours before he has to leave this cramped but well-stocked safehouse to rendezvous with Kay. Seventeen hours before he forces his feet back into the Imperial-issue boots he’s left discarded by the door. Seventeen precious hours that are his, and hers, and no other’s.

He’s not going to waste them pulling their collective lies to pieces.   


“It looks like a _jirray_ ,” he says after a moment, managing to pull his eyes from Jyn to check the screen himself. On the small flickering projection, a nervous-looking young Twi’lek man twists and prods at a lump of dark-colored dough, clearly attempting to shape it into some distinct animal.

Jyn shifts on the mattress, now leaning close enough to him that Cassian can feel her warmth even through the rough fabric of his (probably stolen) shirt. “The hell’s a _jirray?”_

“Kind of canine,” he answers absently, because a piece of her hair has fallen over her cheek and he really, really wants to rub it between his fingers. The impulse is so strong that his hand twitches against the patchy coverlet beneath them. The thought feels obsessive and dangerous, though, so he shoves it away and turns his attention firmly to the screen again.

They sit quietly for a moment as the baker on the screen babbles to a pair of detached judges about the childhood memory that has inspired his current endeavor, and then Jyn shifts some more on the bed next to him. He glances discreetly out of the corner of his eye, and yes, it looks like she’s moved just a tiny bit closer. “He’s making cupcakes into dogs?”

“It’s an ambitious move,” Cassian murmurs, holding very still, waiting.

Which is, he thinks with no small amount of exasperation, a bit ridiculous. Not an hour ago, he had been completely naked and half out of his mind with this woman. Not _half_ an hour ago, she had raked her blunt nails down his back and he had thought for a moment he was going to pass out from sheer pleasure. And now he is laser-focused on the soft brush of her clothed shoulder against his likewise clothed shoulder like an adolescent with his first crush.

On the other hand, he had just spent five months in one of the endless hells, working as the personal aide to one of the most repulsive men to ever crawl upward through the Imperial rank structure. He had worn the heavy grey wool of the enemy’s uniform like armor against the world, against even his own memories, and told himself over and over again that the evil he helped perpetuate stuck to the uniform, not his skin. When he peeled the fucking thing off, his skin underneath would be as clean as it ever was. Lieutenant Joreth Sward was a selfish, thoughtless asshole who served Grendreef without any thought except his own advancement, and Captain Cassian Andor was a spy who was only using Grendreef’s credentials to access impossible to find Imperial data. Sward was the puppet, and Andor the puppeteer. The uniform was the line between them.

(He tells himself that story every time he runs any undercover operation. Sometimes, he even believes it.)

The downside of that mentality, of course, is that when he finally takes the uniform off, the shock of being himself again takes some getting used to. He normally does it alone, in the smallest, safest space of whatever ship is carrying him out, with Kay in the cockpit minding the hyperspace lanes. He pulls off the clothes and detangles the thought processes of the mask he has been wearing, packing away the backstory and writing out the reports until he is Captain Andor again. It takes a few hours, typically, and he always feels a bit sick afterwards, disoriented. It takes even longer to become wholly Cassian again, sometimes so long that he never quite makes it back before another mission comes up and he needs to draw a new line between the spy and the spy's mask.   


This, though. This is different. He hasn’t just pulled off and discarded the old persona, he’s been stripped down to his soul. Wrenched from _Lieutenant_ _Sward_ to _Cassian_ so fast that it nearly gives him whiplash, so fast that the last three hours or so feel like some sort of surreal dream from which he might awaken at any moment. He doesn’t regret it, the abrupt and confusing transition was necessary at the time. He had shed Lieutenant Sward and become Captain Andor when the gangsters that he expected to ransom him to the Alliance tried to kill him instead. And then Jyn had brought him through the storm to her safehouse, and he had shed Andor and become Cassian when she reached up and pressed her lips against his.

He had stripped himself bare in more ways than one, with her – and he is still waiting for the disorientation, the nausea, the usual need to focus on something distant and impersonal like writing a report, or prepping the next op. He is still waiting for the filth of Lieutenant Sward to settle on his vulnerable skin. He is still waiting to hate himself for it. That it hasn't, that he _doesn't_ \- the relief is potent enough to make him stagger. He feels like he's getting away with something, pulling a con on his own mind. It feels like the greatest theft he's ever managed, this fragile peace in his chest.  


“It’s going to look more like dogshit than an actual dog,” Jyn snorts, crossing her bare ankles and wiggling her toes under a fold of the worn coverlet. He can see faint goosebumps forming on her bare legs, though Jyn doesn't seem to notice or care. “See? The shape is puffing up in the oven heat. It’ll get all…” she makes a random gesture in the air with one hand and then rolls her eyes. “Puffy.”

Cassian finds himself smiling, and doesn’t even feel compelled to hide it. “A masterful assessment.”

She leans hard against his shoulder, glaring at him. “Shut up.”

Cassian licks his lips, and lets the same terrifying, exhilarating madness that brought him to this safehouse in the first place take over again. He slips his arm up and tucks it around her shoulder, holding her in place against his side.

Jyn pauses.  He can _feel_ her flash of surprise and uncertainty, so he lets his hand sit lightly on her shoulder, lightly enough that she can tell he will drop it at the first sign that she wants him to do so. “Who even wants to eat a dog-shaped cake?” Jyn wonders aloud in a distracted tone. Without meeting his eyes, she pulls herself closer to curl under his arm. He half-hopes she can’t hear his heart pick up in his chest, pounding faster as she settles with her head on his shoulder and her hand on his stomach. He half-hopes she _can_ hear it, so she will know what effect she has on him, so she will understand what he can’t quite bring himself to say out loud.

“It’s a bold move,” he manages at last, and clears his throat, focusing back on the show to buy himself time to collect his thoughts. Jyn presses her legs against his, and after a moment the goosebumps on her skin fade. She's warm against his side, under his arm, against his hip. He wonders if his body heat comforts her the same way.   


“Brave kid,” Jyn nods. “Trying a Mid Rim recipe on a bunch of poncy Core worlders.”

Her face, when he looks down to answer, is intent in a way he hasn’t ever really seen. Her jaw is relaxed, her forehead smooth, and her eyes bright with interest. She’s enjoying this show, even if she has no real idea what’s happening or who any of these contestants are. There is no fear in her body language, no wariness in her expression. She looks...When she had insisted that he play an episode for her to watch, he had assumed that she was just looking for something to fill in the quiet between them before it turned awkward. Something to distract them from the sweat cooling on their skin and the enormity of what they had just confessed to one another. _This isn’t my life_ , he had told her. _I’ve stolen it_ , she agreed.

But she doesn’t look like she’s just watching to avoid looking at him. She doesn’t seem to be using the holo as an excuse to disengage from him, either. She’s genuinely interested in it. She likes it.

It’s ridiculous that the thought warms him almost as much as her body. This isn’t the first time he’s shared an interest with someone. And yet, he suddenly wants to roll over and kiss her again, for a long, long time. He takes a moment to get that impulse under control, and then asks in a careless tone, “So he’s your favorite, then?”

Jyn purses her lips. “Don’t have a favorite. He’s brave, I’ll give him that. He’ll probably fuck it up, but he’s brave.”

The young baker on the screen finishes moulding the last of his fancy canine cupcakes and starts mixing the ingredients for a frosting so complicated that Cassian can’t identify half the ingredients. The voice-over goes into gentile raptures over how ‘exotic’ the Twi’lek’s recipe is, almost perfectly juxtaposed over a clip of the young man telling the camera how his mothers often made this recipe at home when he was a child. How the ingredients are common and much loved on his homeworld in the Mid-Rim, how the smell reminds him of growing up. “Grav has a good sense of flavor combinations,” the narrator chimes in as the young man bends back over his mixing bowl. “Even if they might seem strange to others.”

Cassian wonders how many of the Core world audience caught that small undercut. How many could pick out the distinct fingerprints of the Imperial Security Bureau's media specialists. Probably not many.

“Hazelnut,” Jyn repeats just as the camera cuts away to focus on one of the other competitors in the show. “That was one of the things in your soup, right?”

Cassian raises an eyebrow at her, but she keeps her eyes on the screen and doesn’t see. “Ginger,” he corrects. “It was _ginger_. How did you get hazelnut from that? The words sound nothing alike.”

“Not in Basic, they don’t,” she sniffs at him archly, although her superior tone is undermined by the fact that she can’t quite hide her smile. “Anyway, I could have sworn you put hazelnut in.”

Cassian prods her side with his thumb. “You sat _right next_ to me while I made it. You saw everything I used.”

She shrugs, and finally turns to smirk up at him. “I wasn’t exactly focused on the _ingredients_ , droid boy.” Her bright green eyes travel deliberately down his face to his throat, and she draws a delicate circle around his navel with her fingertips.

Cassian marvels at the sensation of blood rushing to his face, of his heart thumping awkwardly out of beat in his chest for a moment. This is not his life, he remembers. He doesn’t…he doesn’t _blush,_ in his life. The man he is allowed to be right now in the dim light of this little bedroom, _that_ man can blush, and hug his lover tighter to his side. That man can lean down and press a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth, and smile against her lips when she responds with such enthusiasm that they both nearly lose their balance and crash to the mattress.

Jyn pulls back and looks at him, her eyes bright, her lips red and smiling – and no, this isn’t his life.

In the back of his treacherously hazy mind, he hears a quiet voice that sounds like a younger version of himself suddenly whisper – _it could be_.

“Do you - ” he cuts himself off abruptly, because he isn’t entirely sure where that sentence is going and he isn’t ready to let his chaotic, fuzzy thoughts spill out of him unchecked like that. She probably isn’t ready to hear them. Even if she is –

His brain stutters on that thought, like a boot caught on a trip wire, like a man sucker-punched mid-sentence. _If she is_ –

He licks his suddenly dry lips and nods toward the open door of the bedroom, keeping his voice light. “Do you even _have_ hazelnut in that kitchen?”

Jyn looks at him silently for a long moment; he has the not entirely unpleasant feeling that she can see right through his hasty subject-change to the aborted question, but she lets it go. “Don’t know,” she says at last, adopting a far-too-innocent expression. “What’s hazelnut?”

He prods her side gently with his thumb again. “Very funny.”

On the screen, one of the bakers drops a pan of sweet rolls, and three others rush over to help her pick them up again as she bursts into tears.

“I thought they were competing,” Jyn murmurs, her head resting against his shoulder again, her fingers drawing soft circles on his stomach.

“They are,” he swallows and tries not to arch into her touch. “But the stakes are pretty low. And these people spend a lot of time together while they film their season. They’re friends.”

“I thought you said this was filmed over just a few months?” Jyn’s hand slips under the edge of his sweatshirt, and pauses with her fingertips just barely touching his bare stomach. He is far too aware of the tiny amount of skin contact, and far, far too eager to feel it again. He’s not even really aroused, he thinks with some exasperation, still recovering from the feel of Jyn’s legs wrapped around his hips, her panting breath harsh and intimate in his ear. It’s just…he wants her to touch him. He wants to feel her against him, around him, Force help him, he’s practically aching with it.

Cassian takes a slow, controlled breath in, and presses his hand down over hers, flattening her fingers under his shirt to his body. “Three months total, I think.”

The other bakers finish re-stacking the spilled sweetbuns, one of them busily sorting out bowls of fresh ingredients for the devastated competitor. The Twi’lek making hazelnut cupcakes hugs his competitor until she stops sobbing, patting her shoulder as he murmurs something encouraging the cameras don’t quite pick up.

“Seems fast,” Jyn whispers against his shoulder. “To be friends just like that.”

 _I’ve spent eleven hours with you over the past ten years,_ Cassian thinks, but he doesn’t dare say it. He doesn’t know how she might react, when she realizes that he has been counting. And anyway, it doesn’t matter, does it? That was only the amount of time they had physically been together since they met in the hangar of Yavin IV. It doesn’t account for the long hours they had texted back and forth via the holonet, the times he had specifically re-ordered his schedule so that he could sit quietly and read her letters all the way through, or watch some holovid she recommended, or read a book she had claimed to like. It doesn’t account for the time he had wondered about her, worried for her, thought suddenly of one of her jokes and found himself laughing days after she told it. It doesn’t even begin to cover how much time he had spent telling himself not to think about the feel of her hands tugging him down so she could kiss him goodbye on Haidoral Prime. Nor the time he had spent ignoring his own damn advice and pressing his knuckles to his mouth as he remembered the warmth of her body against his and the relief that she cared about him coupled with the bitterness that circumstance had forced him to leave her behind.

No, the number of hours he has actually spent in her company is…unimportant.

What matters are the hours he has with her now. He is determined to stay focused on the life he has right now, even if he knows he can’t keep it. Sixteen and a half hours before his stolen life is over.

“I guess it happens like that sometimes,” he says softly into the quiet of the room. Even the show has shifted from cheerful narration and bright-eyed bakers explaining their vision to an almost contemplative musical score as the camera pans from one oven to another. Distantly, he can still hear the rumble of thunder and the steady drumming of the rainstorm outside, but it only serves to mute the world even more. He can hear his own heartbeat again. He can hear Jyn’s breathing, steady and calm.

She lifts her head and presses her lips to his throat, right along the edge of his painfully neat beard. “I guess it does,” she says against the sensitive skin under her mouth, and for a moment he forgets the brittle way he felt when he cut that sharp line in his beard to make it match Imperial regulations.

The music suddenly turns dramatic, the camera cutting between increasingly frantic bakers who slam oven doors, smear frosting in large globs, and dash frantically around their assigned stations as the hosts give them a countdown to the end of the round. Jyn turns back to the screen, and Cassian lets himself reach up with his free hand and brush his fingertips along her cheek, tucking that errant strand of dark hair back behind her ear. She responds by running her hand under his shirt up to his sternum, and then back down to the waist of his trousers.

He misses the first couple bakers facing the cool, critical eye of the judges, but then Jyn wiggles against him in anticipation and says with a hint of excitement carefully hidden under a dismissive tone, “It’s our canine cupcake boy.”

“You can almost see it,” he muses, eyeing the image. “The heads are still reasonably distinct.”

“The little eyes are kind of cool.”

“They look well risen." He indulges himself a little and drags his hand from her hip up her side, curving his hand a little to cup the underside of her breast, and then back down again. Jyn shivers and retaliates by pushing her hand back up his chest and resting her palm over his heart. She even traces her finger around his nipple, just to let him know she is aware of his reaction to her touch. Cassian clears his throat. “Probably tastes good,” he manages through a tight throat.

Jyn hums, and scratches the pads of her fingers down his chest through his chest hair and back to his navel. Her pinkie slips under the waistband of his trousers and then lies maddeningly still against his sensitive skin. “They still kind of look like piles of dog shit.”

“I have to say,” one of the judges begins in a crisp Coruscanti accent. “I’m not sure how they are at home, dear, but they aren’t, ah, terribly appetizing to look at now, are they?”

“No, I’m so sorry,” the Twi’lek hunchs his shoulders, his lekku turning greener with embarrassment.

“Hey,” Jyn growls at the screen.

The other host laughs, shaking his head. “They look like, um, you know what I’m going to say, right?”

“I must have overproved them, I’m sorry,” the Twi’lek’s lekku are several shades darker than his natural skin tone now. “Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” Jyn tells the screen firmly. “It’s fine. They look fine. Just like chubby jerries.”

“ _Jirrays_ ,” Cassian finds that he’s smiling again, and something that feels like a laugh is caught in the back of his throat.

“ _Dogs_ ,” she says repressively, focused on the judges' faces as they cut open one of the offered cupcakes. The screen zooms tightly on the baker's apprehensive face, the music humming a low, ominous note. Jyn sets her jaw stubbornly. "You didn’t overprove anything, kid.”

The 'kid' is almost ten years older than her. Cassian smirks down at her, eyebrows raised in mock surprise. “Oh, you bake?”

Jyn brushes her hand up his chest again, then quickly, before he can process what she means to do, she tucks her hand down his side to _that spot_ on his ribs and digs her fingers in.

Cassian jerks and curses, and pins her hand under his shirt again, this time a lot less tentatively. Jyn doesn’t look up at him, but he can feel her shoulders trembling with the effort not to laugh. “Not,” he tells her irritably, “ticklish.”

“Sure you’re not,” she nods, and presses a quick kiss to the back of his hand.

No one has ever kissed the back of Cassian’s hand in his life.

But then, this isn’t his life, is it?

The tense music fades abruptly out to tense silence, and Jyn’s attention shifts back to the screen. The judges chew thoughtfully on vaguely dog-shaped cupcakes, the Twi’lek bites his lip, and Jyn narrows her eyes.  A weirdly appropriate roll of thunder outside the safehouse rattles the windows just as the judges both look up at the anxious baker. “A lovely combination,” one says. “The aftertaste is quite light and refreshing.”

“Ginger,” Jyn says wisely.

“Or hazelnut,” Cassian teases.

She wiggles her fingers against his side warningly, but it a weak threat with his hand still clamped firmly over them.

The other judge looks thoughtfully at the Twi’lek, then shakes his head. “Dry. Bland. I’ve barely got any ginger coming through at all. This is, sadly, your worst bake so far.”

“ _Spiders to nest in your rotting tongue_ ,” Jyn bursts out in Huttese, surging up to her knees. She looks ready to launch herself at the screen; reflexively, Cassian throws his arms around her waist and drags her back. She lands in his lap with a huff, still glowering. The camera switches from the judge’s stern face to the Twi’lek, whose lip trembles as he sniffs and offers another volley of apologies. "Don't you dare cry for that piece of banthashit," Jyn tells the baker fiercely. "He doesn't get that."  


Cassian waits a moment to see if she pushes herself out of his grip. She’s a warm bundle of hard muscle, sharp bones, and soft curves against his body, and Cassian freezes as her weight settles on his lap and in his arms. His chest feels tight, his muscles almost aching with the delicate tension between holding her steady and preparing to let go the moment she pulls away.

Jyn growls low in her throat and crosses her arms over his, slumping back against his chest as she glares at the screen. “I’d like to see that arsehole do better in an hour time limit.”

He can’t help it; he laughs. He presses a kiss to the back of her neck and smiles when she squirms. “He’s an intergalactic chef, Jyn.”

“He’s an intergalactic _shutta_ ,” she snips back without the slightest hint of repentance. Cassian laughs again, and tucks his arms tight around her, cradling her body back against his own.

This isn’t his life, but for now, he is going to pretend that it is. For now, he’s going to sit here and watch people panic over their silly tragedies and celebrate their tiny triumphs, tease Jyn about her opinions on foods he knows for a fact she’s never eaten before, and stop fighting every little impulse to touch her. He's allowed to touch her, welcomed, wanted. He is not Sward, or Baari Orvo, Kaarl Dalgis or Willix or any of the others. He is…he is…

“Cassian,” Jyn says abruptly, tilting her head back until it rests on his shoulder again and her throat is exposed in a long, beautiful line. “Is this…?” She presses her lips together, opens her mouth to speak again, then closes it. She shoots him a covert look, like she’s worried he’ll be angry with her stammering. He’s not, though, far from it. He understands. He does.

Cassian leans his head down and kisses the side of her neck, because she offered, because he can. Because this is the life they have, right now. “Yeah.”

And he almost says it then, almost finds the courage to ask her what he has been aching to ask her for hours, for months, hells, for years if he’s being totally honest. _Are you happy like this? With me? Is this what you want, too? Would you come with me, and see if we can keep this? Would you stay?_

“If they make him cry again,” Jyn says meditatively as the music starts up on the holo, signaling the start of the next challenge, “I’m going to send that judge a hundred porn mag subscriptions. For the really _nasty_ stuff.”

Cassian has never laughed so hard that he fell over, but he finds it’s an enjoyable experience. Especially since Jyn loses her balances and crashes over on top of him, grinning as she twists and wiggles until they are curled tight together, Cassian watching the screen over her shoulder as she folds her arms over his again.

He can wait. He has sixteen hours to live this stolen life. He will enjoy every second that he can snatch from the indifferent cruelty of the galaxy, and then he’ll ask her if she would be willing to help him steal a few more. This night in Jyn’s safehouse might be the best heist he’s ever pulled, but if he’s careful and he’s lucky, it might only be the beginning.

It’s a terrifying thought, an exhilarating thought, a dangerous thought. This isn’t his life, but –

“Lychee and wasabi,” Jyn murmurs, her toes rubbing idly against his shins. “Who the fuck puts those in a _cake?_ ”

Maybe, maybe –

“Hey,” she arches her back against him to get his attention (it does, it really, really does), “would you make a cake with wasabi?”

Cassian closes his eyes and breathes her in. “You want one?”

She laughs, shaking her head and Cassian breathes through the joy of it. Despite all the odds and all the shit he’s survived and all the horror of the world outside, he can pretend that this is his life.

And maybe, someday, it will be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _my blood approves_   
>  _and kisses are a better fate_   
>  _than wisdom_
> 
> \- e e cummings
> 
>  
> 
> The Twi’lek was based on Rav from [this season](https://www.vulture.com/2017/06/great-british-baking-show-contestants-season-four.html), who I became inordinately fond of and rooted for very hard.

**Author's Note:**

>  _who pays any attention_  
>  _to the syntax of things_  
>  _will never wholly kiss you_  
>  \- e e cummings


End file.
